APAFS renews sponsorship of GIPS

HAGATNA, Guam—The Asia Pacific Association for Fiduciary Studies and CFA Institute jointly announced yesterday that CFA Institute has approved the APAFS as an official sponsor of the Global Investment Performance Standards, or GIPS® standards, for the Micronesia region.  
The GIPS standards are recognized with high compliance levels among key financial centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa, and the Far East.

Although the activities of the GIPS standards are funded and administered by CFA Institute, their success is the result of an alliance of sponsors with experts from a variety of fields within the global investment industry.  These key industry groups have been involved in and contributed significantly to promoting and developing the GIPS standards.  The APAFS was the 27th group to join this alliance in 2006.

“We are very proud to be once again selected to continue the important role of promoting the GIPS standards in Micronesia.  In continuing as a sponsor, we will jointly cooperate with CFA Institute in setting best practices in investment performance,” said APAFS executive director Daniel A. Roland, CIMA®, AIFA®.

As a GIPS standards sponsor, APAFS will continue to “ensure that the foregoing standards will be applicable to Micronesia and that investment performance calculation and presentation can be compared from one place to another,” Roland added.

“We are pleased to renew our partnership with the APAFS as the endorsed GIPS Standards Sponsor in Micronesia,” said Karyn D. Vincent, senior head, Global Industry Standards, CFA Institute, “and look forward to working together with APAFS and its institutional fund membership over the coming years.

“APAFS’s leadership provides a model for other institutional fund sponsor associations and I applaud the commitment of APAFS to actively promote fiduciary best practices such as the GIPS standards,” she added.

Based on the principles of fair representation and full disclosure, the GIPS standards provide an ethical framework for the calculation and presentation of investment performance for investment management firms.  The GIPS standards benefit both the investment management firms and their current and potential investing clients.  Global standardization of investment performance reporting gives investors around the world the additional transparency they need to compare investment managers and will allow managers to compete for new business in foreign markets.

“From the plan sponsors’ perspective, the major benefit of the GIPS standards is to advocate high quality and a unified approach in performance presentation practice and hence, provides users with a greater degree of confidence in the performance data being presented by prospective service providers,” said Gerard Cruz, trustee, Government of Guam Employees Retirement Fund, and chairman of the APAFS board of governors.

About APAFS
APAFS is a non-profit educational and charitable association founded in 2000 for and by, representatives from public and private institutional funds from around the Asia Pacific region. The goal of APAFS is to raise the level of understanding and standards of practice among fiduciaries in the region, so that they might provide the most prudent stewardship of the funds entrusted to their care. More information can be found at www.apafs.org.

About CFA Institute
CFA Institute is the global association of investment professionals. Our aim is to create an environment where investors’ interests come first, markets function at their best, and economies grow. There are more than 170,000 CFA charterholders worldwide in 162 markets. CFA Institute has nine offices worldwide and there are 158 local member societies. For more information, visit www.cfainstitute.org. (PR)